The Importance Of Thermoregulation

Introduction: If you have ever went outside in the winter and stayed outdoors for a couple of hours you probably noticed that you slowly lose the feeling in your hands as your blood is redirected to your core body (organs in the chest and abdomen). This is because your body detects that you are in a cold environment and that it is loosing too much heat. To deal with this you body redirects your blood flow to the core of the body in order to maintain a constant core temperature by decreasing the distance the blood travels, thus decreasing heat loss. Your body also will subconsciously make your muscles convulse strenuously in order the induce shivering, a process that enables your body to convert its energy storage (fat) into quick body heat.
While humans can keep this up for a few hours, eventually they will suffer hypothermia and could possibly die if they don’t increase their body temperature. This makes you wonder what about the animals of the Arctic/Antarctic that have to deal with the extreme cold at all times. Due to this extreme weather arctic animals have developed unique ways in which to deal with their
Thermoregulation is the regulation of the body’s temperature gradient, this gradient exists because the core body (organs in chest and abdomen as well as the brain) produces around two-thirds of ones body heat and that heat has to go somewhere, so it is transported to the bodies outer extremities through the blood. When the blood leaves the core body it is transported all around the body increasing its surface area, which allows for more heat diffusion cooling the blood as it is exposed to the atmosphere. From here the “cooled” blood travels back to the core cooling the organs as it exchanges heat with them. This is the fundamental concept of thermoregulation; however, for some of the animals in the arctic the concern is not hyperthermia, but hypothermia. (Schmidt-Nielsen,